Debian Weekly News - January 14th, 2003

Welcome to this year's second issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the
Debian community. It looks as if the GCC transition reported
in last week's issue is working well. A new verb was accidentally created
during a discussion about KDE 3 and Debian. It was said that KDE 3
will sid soon. A contribution to an elitist Debian dialect.

SPI Progress. Nils Lohner resigned as president of Software in the
Public Interest (SPI) and Ean Schuessler was appointed as new vice president. SPI provides legal and financial support
for several Free Software projects, including Debian. On the most recent
Board meeting, a charter for a by-laws committee was resolved. John Goerzen will be chairing
the committee to revise SPI by-laws. Three volunteers are still needed to fill open seats. Additionally nominations to fill three open seats on the SPI board are also being
accepted and members will vote on them. As always, SPI is
inviting interested people to become new members.

Interview: Living up to the Linux name. Sam Varghese from The Age featured an interview with a member of the Debian Press Team this week. Sam wanted to
know the key differences between Debian and other distributions, what the
motivation for Debian developers was since there didn't seem to be any
payback, whether the release cycle was a strength or weakness and predictions
for the future of the Debian project.

Screen Snapshots of the Installation Process. The Debian
Press Team recently received a request from
Personal Computer World, a UK-based PC
magazine, for snapshots of the woody installation process. Thorsten Sauter
was kind
enough to produce a set of PNG images,
that shows all important steps of installing a woody system.

3.0r1 Update CDs Available. Significant hardware
problems over the holiday period caused some delay, but Steve McIntyre
finally generated update CD images for Debian 3.0 to 3.0r1. Using jigdo and the template
files update CDs are now available.

Potential x86-64 Port of Debian. Bart Trojanowski expressed
interest in getting work started on porting Debian to AMD's upcoming x86-64 architecture. The x86-64
architecture will be AMD's new 64 bit processor, which is
expected to enable simultaneous 32-bit and 64-bit computing. Michael Banck
discussed the possibility of gaining access to x86-64 hardware with AMD's
Open Source representative, but that includes an
evil NDA and thus is not possible for Debian at the moment.

Itsy Package Management System. Josh Narins was curious
about the oldest hardware still running Debian. After some people described
old 486 and
386
machines still alive with Debian, discussion turned to the slow
performance of dpkg under these resource-limited environments. Josh then
found
the Itsy Package Management
System (iPKG). iPKG was designed to be as much like Debian's package
management system as possible and supports the .deb
package format.
However, iPKG is very lightweight and tailored for GNU/Linux installations
with severe storage limitations such as handheld computers.

Free Software Licenses Revocable? Recent postings on Advogato discuss the legality of
developers retrospectively revoking licenses such as the GNU General Public License (GPL).
Also under debate was the role (if any) of contract law in the
enforcement or regulation of copyright
licenses and whether or not Free Software licenses are granted in
perpetuity. There is currently some ambiguity in this area, although it
seems that outcomes will vary depending upon which jurisdiction a developer
is located in. A call was made to update the GPL to more clearly address
these issues.

Problem with Web Page Encoding. Tomohiro Kubota (久保田智広) discovered a
severe problem with non-ASCII characters on automatically generated
multilingual web pages when multibyte
encoding (such as ISO-2022-JP for Japanese or EUC-KR for Korean) is used. He
notes that ISO-8859-1 is a local character encoding like KOI8-R
and EUC-JP (they conflict with one another), and hence, should not be used when a
different encoding is specified on web pages. Instead, non-ASCII characters
should be encoded as HTML entities.

Kernel without Ext2 Support? Marcel Kolaja noticed
that the kernel configuration for i386 and i686 optimized kernels differ in
regard to the second extended filesystem (Ext2). The latter has it compiled
only as a module. Josselin
Mouette and Daniel
Jacobowitz explained that this is a feature rather then a bug. The kernel
loads a ramdisk with the modules in it. In Linux 2.6 initrd will be replaced
by initramfs.

Altering Debian Release Numbers. Scott James Remnant proposed to
alter the release numbering scheme since he believes that the next Debian
release will be a new major version as well, and should therefore be named
Debian 4 (sarge) instead of Debian 4.0 (sarge). Martin Michlmayr added that
one of the most important things to keep in mind when proposing to change
something which is exposed to every user is that one should be
conservative.

New Virtual Package Name dns-server? Toni Mueller suggested
to create one or two new virtual package names for nameservers. He noticed
that Debian ships several and they only partially conflict with each other.
Michael Poole wondered
why packages need to conflict since they can be installed concurrently and
only need to be configured differently.

Installing Woody on a Vaio Laptop. Roger Lipscombe took some notes,
documenting how he installed Debian 3.0 (Woody) on his Vaio SRX87 laptop.
Because the laptop comes with a firewire based DVD-ROM drive which is
currently not supported by the installation process, he had to do a network
installation, using PXE to boot from the network.

Creating a .deb of .deb Files. Steve Traugott wanted to
know if there is a tool that bundles a Debian package, its prerequisite
packages, and its related debconf db deltas, into a single archive. He tries
to implement techniques described in this administration paper.
The existing tool apt-zip is not sufficient.

The Story of radiusd-freeradius. Chad Miller explained
the current status of radiusd-freeradius. A dummy bug was filed against this
package to keep it outside of woody, but unfortunately the bug report wasn't
removed after the release and when the maintainer didn't pay enough attention
the package was removed from testing and unstable during an announced mass
removal. The package can't be added back since it indirectly links against
libssl but is licensed under the GNU GPL. However, some people
maintain
private packages for radiusd-freeradius.

CUPS and SSL. Jeff Licquia contacted the
developers of GNU TLS to discuss whether the OpenSSL compatibility library could
be re-licensed using the GNU Lesser General Public License
(LGPL). Nikos Mavroyanopoulos from GNU TLS replied
that this is up to its author, of course, and Jeff added that
he is probably going to write native GNU TLS support for CUPS on his own.

Random Requests to remove Packages. James Troup contacted the
QA team since ftpmasters are receiving an increased amount of bug reports
asking for the removal of packages. However, these requests didn't come from
their maintainers or the QA team but from random people who often aren't even
developers. He doesn't feel comfortable with ftpmaster making the decision of
whether or not to remove packages. Future requests for removal will be
discussed by the QA team.

Porting OSCAR to Debian? Benoit des Ligneris wondered
whether Debian would be interested in porting OSCAR, a collection of userland
programs to do clustering, to the Debian system. Current tools are mainly for
scientific computation purposes. Benoit added a list of problems that need to
be resolved. Interested people could easily join and work on them.

Building GTK Applications for Windows on Debian. James
Michael DuPont sent a call for
help and requested support from the Debian community. The goal is to build
the dia application
for the W32 platform using Debian and the MingW32 cross-compiler. He also
suggested to use the GTK port for W32 to build a graphical installer based on
GTK and the debian-installer.

Debian on the X-box. If you are still looking for a cool
digital video recorder and home entertainment platform, the Dreamix project may be interesting for you. Its goal is to bring Open
Source personal video recording, video and audio playback, and image viewing
capabilities to the X-box. Although Dreamix will be based on Debian
X-box-Linux, all necessary libraries will be included in the distribution of
the CD image and will auto-execute after the CD is inserted into the X-box
DVD drive.

Debian Privacy Notice Updated. We reported about a privacy
notice for Debian in our last issue. It has since then been pointed out
that a disclaimer page already
exists for the Debian mailing lists,
and that this could be used as a template for a more general disclaimer or
privacy notice for many more things in Debian, such as the PTS (package
tracking system), BTS (bug tracking system) and others. Any contributions to
this effort would be welcomed, e.g. as a follow-up to the above thread.
A proposal
was made for reviewing.

Security Updates. You know the drill. Please make sure
that you update your systems if you have any of these packages installed.

Orphaned Packages. 6 packages were orphaned this week and
require a new maintainer. This makes a total of 167 orphaned packages. Many
thanks to the previous maintainers who contributed to the Free Software
community. Please see the WNPP pages for
the full list, and please add a note to the bug report and retitle it to ITA:
if you plan to take over a package.

Want to continue reading DWN? Please help us create this
newsletter. Several people are submitting items already, but we are
still in need of volunteer writers who prepare items.
Please see the contributing
page to find out how to help. We're looking forward to receiving your
mail at dwn@debian.org.